Shocking and unsettling as they were, contact with life-forms from another dimension was never on the list of volunteers’ reasons for participating in our research. Neither was it something I expected with any frequency. Rather, it was the transpersonal, mystical, and spiritual states to which they aspired. It is to these that we now will shift our attention.
15
Death and Dying
Since Raymond Moody published Life After Life in 1975, and Kenneth Ring Life at Death in 1980, the expression “near-death experience” has been a part of our vocabulary.1 These highly unusual altered states of consciousness occur when the body faces life-threatening circumstances, such as when a rock climber free-falls off a cliff. They also may occur when the body actually has begun to die, such as after a massive heart attack or when drowning.
The broad outline of a near-death experience (NDE) includes the sensation of rapid travel through a tunnel, sometimes accompanied by voices, songs, or music. There is the presence of “others”—living or dead relatives, friends, and family members. These beings also may take the form of spirits, angels, or other “helpers.” The realization may come that one really is dead.
Many experience feelings of great peace and calm, although others report terrifying images and emotions. Some experience a “life review,” the organized and rapid recollection of personal memories ending at this present moment. Some feel “commanded” to return to life because it is not yet time for them to die.
The NDE may climax with a merging into an indescribably loving and powerful white light that emanates from the divine, holy, and sacred. This leads to a mystical or spiritual experience in which time and space lose all meaning. Those who undergo an NDE feel embraced by something much greater than themselves, or anything they previously could have imagined: the “source of all existence.” There’s a certainty that consciousness exists after death. Those who reach the mystical level of the NDE emerge with a greater appreciation for life, less fear of death, and a reorientation of their priorities to less material and more spiritual pursuits.
The sense of reality of what near-death experiencers see and feel is undeniably certain, and it’s common to hear expressions like “it was more real than real.” It is difficult for those “coming back” from an NDE to describe it; they often say it is “beyond language.”
Since one of the theories motivating my DMT research was the belief that the spirit molecule is released by the pineal gland when we die, or nearly die, I listened carefully for these types of experiences. If outside-administered DMT replicated features of the NDE, it would strengthen my hypothesis that endogenous DMT mediates naturally occurring NDEs.
However, in only two research subjects, Willow and Carlos, did themes of death and dying clearly dominate the sessions. Therefore, based upon what we actually saw during our research, I now think this original expectation was naïve.
The problem with anticipating frequent NDEs in our volunteers concerns set and setting. Clearly, many of our research subjects experienced a radical and complete separation of consciousness from their bodies. For most of us, this would make us feel as if we had died. However, many of our recruits had already undergone this type of dissociation in their previous psychedelic experiences. They knew what it was when it happened at the Research Center. They realized they weren’t dying or near death, and therefore they could watch the unfolding of effects with far greater balance and poise. They did not panic, but instead kept alert and focused on observing and remembering what was going on. Within a few minutes, the DMT started wearing off, and they reentered their bodies.
Certainly, if their out-of-body state lasted much longer than a few minutes, and if we actually were making efforts to resuscitate them, a more “classic” NDE might have developed. However, our volunteers were undergoing experiences probably only inexperienced and unprepared individuals would have interpreted as death or near-death.
Let’s first proceed to several volunteers’ sessions that make passing reference to death themes. In them, they almost casually referred to the “deathlike” nature of the high-dose DMT experience. Then we’ll look more carefully at Willow’s and Carlos’s sessions, in which death and near-death themes took center stage.
Elena’s high-dose DMT sessions partook of many elements of a spiritual enlightenment experience. We will hear about them in the next chapter. For now, however, I will share a comment she included in a letter she sent to me a year after finishing her DMT study:
More than once, the DMT sessions gave me the gift of truly subjectively knowing the phenomenon described in “Introductions to the Dead” in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Even greater is the gift of knowing that I have had practice dying and returning.
Elena’s comments were not the only time we heard reference to The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In this centuries-old text, Tibetan Buddhist practitioners have “charted” out the various bardo states that one enters along the path from dying to rebirth into one’s next life-form. Bardo is sometimes defined as “intermediary state,” that is, between life, death, and rebirth. Many descriptions of the bardos echo unerringly reports gathered from those who have had an NDE.2
Sean, whose spiritual enlightenment experience we also examine closely in the next chapter, made this remark on one of the days he helped us develop the dosage schedule for the tolerance study:
It’s so far out, so weird, so out of control, you have to learn something. I think I’ve learned what it’s like to die, to be completely helpless in the throes of something. That’s been helpful.
Eli, whom we met in chapter 12, wrote to us after his first high dose of DMT:
Stunned, I felt myself holding back. I relaxed and the environment began to change noticeably. I knew I was going through the first bardo of death, that I had been here many times before, and it was okay. “This is just like the last time,” I thought. Enough continuity with my waking consciousness gave me this thought next: “But this is my first time crossing over.” I concluded I had broken out of time and space and either was experiencing my “normal” pattern of dying or was connected to a time in the future when, once again, I will know “this is the time I was in, back then, now.”
Some months later, in another study, Eli said,
I no longer fear death. It’s like you’re there one minute and then you’re somewhere else, and that’s just how it is. So I think it had that effect. These experiments are helping me in my reading of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.3 I know what it’s like to be totally free.
Joseph, a thirty-nine-year-old Italian–Native American businessman, also noted how deathlike the DMT experience was:
I think the high dose is like a death trauma. It knocks you out of your body. I could have tolerated death or some major physical leaping-out-of-this-plane type of experience under DMT. This would be a good drug for people in a hospice program or the terminally ill to have some acquaintance with.
Unlike these other research subjects, death and near-death themes dominated in Willow’s and Carlos’s high-dose journeys with the spirit molecule. Let’s now turn to their stories.
Willow was thirty-nine years old when she joined the DMT project. She was married and lived in a semirural part of the county. She was a medical social worker who treated drug-abusing professionals. She saw the irony in her own participation in our study and appreciated our overriding concern with confidentiality and anonymity.
Willow used psychedelic drugs two or three times a year and had taken them around thirty times in total. She volunteered for the DMT project due to her “curiosity, and the opportunity to experience deeper or higher states of consciousness, to gain insights about my own functioning.”
Willow’s low non-blind dose produced stronger-than-average effects.
I’ve never had so many visuals.
I warned her about tomorrow’s session, saying, “It’s kind of like falling off a cliff.”
I like to think of myself as daring, jumping off a cliff.
/> The next morning we got right down to business, spending very little time catching up or chatting. It was not even 8 A.M. by the time I finished administering the DMT to Willow. Her body made a small jerk.
Even though a jet flew overhead at 3 minutes, the room and ward had taken on the deep solid silence that every so often blessed our high-dose DMT sessions. Willow laid nearly perfectly still for the next 25 minutes. Then I started getting restless and gently asked her how she was doing.
Good. It’s a very enchanting place. I almost don’t want to leave it. Transitions are completions. How I am. Who I am.
First I saw a tunnel or channel of light off to the right. I had to turn to go into it. Then the whole process repeated on the left. It was intentional that way. It was as if it had a source, further away. It got bigger farther away, like a funnel. It was bright and pulsating. There was a sound like music, like a score, but unfamiliar to me, supporting the emotional tone of the events and drawing me in. I was very small. It was very large. There were large beings in the tunnel, on the right side, next to me. I had a sense of great speed. Everything was unimportant relative to this. Things were flashing, flashing by, as if from a different perspective. It was so much more real than life.
The left and right tunnels joined in front of me. There were gremlins, small, faces mostly. They had wings and tails and stuff. I paid them little attention. The larger beings were there to sustain and support me. That was their realm. A sort of good and evil thing: the gremlins versus the tall beings. The tall beings were loving, smiling and serene.
Something rushed through me, out of me. I remember thinking at some point, “Here comes the separation.” I felt my body only when I swallowed or breathed, and that really wasn’t a physical feeling as much as a way of setting ripples through the experience. I felt strongly, “This is dying and this is okay.”
I had heard of the bright light tunnel, but I didn’t expect it to be the way it was here today. I thought it would be primarily in front of me, but this took turns on both sides and then joined in front. Nor was it as bright as I thought it might be.
I’m amazed DMT is in the body. It’s there for a reason. It’s there for dying today. I had a sense of dying, letting go and separating, after the beings in the tunnel helped me along.
“How do you feel about returning, being back in your body?”
It’s okay for now.
She sounded wistful.
The other side is very, very different. There are no words, body, or sounds there to limit things. I first saw deep space, white with stars. Then there was this multidimensional experience starting. It was alive. It was the aliveness that I heard. My body was trying to say, “Remember the body” as I was going into that place. It wasn’t a desperate cry, but an attempt to keep it real, make the experience real from the point of view of the senses. The body wanted me back.
I thought I could see light down below, the world’s light. It was like a little flap was lifted, like a simultaneous alternate reality.
A few months later, Willow reexperienced another high dose of DMT in the menstrual phase study. As she stirred, she began speaking:
It’s like a cosmic joke. If we all knew what was waiting for us, we’d all kill ourselves. That’s why we stay in this form for so long, to figure that out. That’s also why it’s so hard to remember the immediacy of it.
I’ve been reading books about the near-death experience: Saved by the Light and Embraced by the Light. They really do a good job describing the DMT state. I’m reading them in such a familiar manner.4
Everyone should try a high dose of DMT once. I don’t know if the beings today were saying “Try death once” or “Try life once.” That place is so full and so complete that the idea of this place is to try and be as complete as possible. Yet when I came back into my body it was so heavy and so confining. Also, time here seems so strange. Eternity is an attribute of the place. It would have to be.
While it’s never a good idea to call anyone’s experiences on DMT “classic,” I think it’s not too far afield to use that term in describing Willow’s near-death experiences. Her consciousness separated from her body, she moved rapidly through a tunnel, or tunnels, toward a warm, loving, all-knowing white light. Beings helped her on the way, and some even threatened to drag her down. Beautiful music accompanied her on the early stages of the journey. Time and space lost all meaning. She was tempted not to return, but realized she needed to share the incredible information she received with this world. There were spiritual and mystical overtones to her joining with and basking in the white light.
Willow’s dawning awareness of a “light down below, the world’s light” also reminds us of one of the last bardos in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is the stage in which the soul starts looking for a new body in which to incarnate, sees the lights of the world, and starts its descent.
Her comment about everyone committing suicide if they knew how great the “afterlife” is points out another similarity between Willow’s experiences and those of “naturally occurring” NDEs: That is, those who have had an NDE do not rush off to suicide. Rather, they reside in the knowledge that there is “life after death,” and that transition loses its sting. Thus, they are able to live life more fully, because the fear of death that drives so many to distraction is now so much less.
I was interested to hear that she found reading popular books describing the near-death experience to be like reviewing her own DMT sessions. I needed little more validation to believe we were on the right track in relating high levels of DMT to the NDE.
Carlos was a challenge. Exuberant, outspoken, and playfully confrontational, he was forty-four years old when he joined the DMT research. He hailed from Hispanic and northern Mexican-Indian families, had been married for nearly twenty years, and had two grown children. Carlos was a full-time software programmer and had attended the University of New Mexico for several years. He also was a practitioner of urban shamanism. In this capacity, he led a group in which chanting, visualization, and his teachings provided his students with a wide range of alternative states of consciousness. He had his feet in several worlds at once.
Carlos was well-versed in many mind-altering substances. He had taken psychedelics “over one hundred times” and described their effects as “complete strangeness.” He recently also had used the seeds of Datura stramonium, or jimsonweed, a highly toxic and dangerous plant that induces delirium and, at times, terrifying breaks with reality. There is not much difference between psychedelic and lethal doses of these seeds.
Carlos was not expecting much from “white man’s medicine.” This set up a curious dichotomy within me. On the one hand, I wanted to “show him who’s got the better drugs.” Not the most noble reaction, but true! On the other hand, I was concerned that his scoffing at DMT was not wise, and that he might be unpleasantly surprised by the intensity of its effects. Perhaps his cavalier attitude hid deeper fears.
The morning of his non-blind low dose, we found Carlos sitting in the rocking chair I used. He had arrived almost two hours early. He was leaving nothing to chance and was not-so-subtly challenging my “seat of authority.”
“This will be a trip around the block to the local convenience store, rather than a trip to someplace else,” he opened.
Before we began, he wanted to bless the DMT to “the four directions” and for the good of the community. This was traditional shamanic preparation of a mind-altering substance. His benedictions were simple but profound. They successfully established a feeling of deeper reverence for the work than was usually the case.
His low-dose experience that morning seemed relatively mild. That is, until he began shaking at 15 minutes after the injection. First were only fine tremors, but these quickly progressed to rather pronounced whole-body shakes.
I hate this part. My own body, my energy starts to shake. It’s like after any spiritual trip. It’s like an aftershock. Every time I do any kind of psychoactive drug I shake for awhile. Do
other people do that?
An unexpected vulnerability.
I answered carefully, seeing an opening to a more honest and deeper relationship. “Sometimes, especially after the high dose. Not usually after the low dose. I wonder if it’s fear.”
He actually seemed quite uncomfortable, shaking, looking somewhat frightened.
Don’t worry, this is nothing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big dose or little dose of anything. I shake because of the post-traumatic effects.
His shivering started going away while he filled out the questionnaire. He felt fine after completing it, ate a light snack, and left for the day.
Later, Laura and I talked about Carlos’s reaction to this little dose of DMT. While he described its effects as “miniscule,” his body had a rather different reaction to it. We thought it best to bend the rules a little and give him 0.2 mg/kg before jumping to 0.4.
When I told him, Carlos offered no resistance to the plan: “You guys know best.”
This foresight seemed warranted. As I entered the room the next week, Carlos was shaking badly in response to the ward nurse having failed three times to start his IV line.
In the offhanded manner we were beginning to recognize, he said, “This started in the 1970s when I went into a church once.”
I started leaning toward being more concerned for his welfare than that our white man’s DMT “wouldn’t be enough.”
I warned him, “This will push you. It will give you an idea what twice this amount might be like. It is a psychedelic dose.”
“Okay, I’m looking forward to it. I’d like to have some more of a psychedelic effect.”
The injection went smoothly. At 12 minutes, he laughed loudly and exclaimed:
Oh, boy! There is no spiritual value . . . none! Ask me some questions.
“Well, what happened?”
I was wondering, “What is this?” Then it came to me. This is the drug. This is what it does. There was too much to process. It’s like trying to listen to music that is just loud. I didn’t know what was going on. I wondered if I’d died. I’ve taken so many psychedelics and nothing like this has ever happened. My nervous system was squashed. My spirit was smashed.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences Page 24